Eric Schmidt

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Bio

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Bio

The executive chairman of Google and now Alphabet was an excellent student and all-around striver in high school in Virginia, and later at Princeton, where he studied architecture before changing his major to electrical engineering.
After graduation, Eric Schmidt worked for a number of information-technology companies, including Bell Labs and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center.

But few could have anticipated that he would eventually run the most disruptive and, arguably, powerful company on the planet. In 2001, however, venture capitalist John Doerr introduced wunderkind Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to Schmidt. (Doerr’s company had recently invested $12.5 million in Google.) Doerr believed strongly that Google needed a C.E.O. with more executive experience; he thought Schmidt would help lend a little business heft to the fast-growing start-up.

In the beginning, it was “rocky,” as Wired noted in 2011. But over the years, as Google’s profits soared, Brin and Page grew to appreciate Schmidt’s management style and business acumen. As Wired put it: “Schmidt helped balance the founders’ idiosyncratic urges with more traditional practices.”